WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Federation of Teachers has pumped $500,000 into foundations tied to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the last year, and Clinton has repaid the favor by vowing to limit school choice.

The union’s most recent financial disclosure shows the AFT gave the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation $250,000 last year, and another $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative, joining foreign countries, Arabian sheiks, big bank CEOs, hedge fund managers, multinational corporations and others who have contributed to the “charities,” Dropout Nation reports.

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“Altogether, AFT has doled out $2.2 million into Clinton-controlled nonprofits over the past four years,” according to the education blog and federal financial disclosures.

The International Business Times reported on how payments to Clinton’s foundations by foreign governments and U.S. businesses resulted in State Department approval for arms deals, while the Associated Press has documented special access to Clinton for foundation donors during her tenure as Secretary of State.

The mega-donations the nation’s second-largest teachers union made to Clinton “charities” – which accounted for 10 percent of all of the AFT’s charitable giving between July 2015 and June 2016 – seem to coincide with Clinton’s increasingly outspoken opposition to charter schools over the last year.

But there a lot of other ties between the union and Clinton’s political machine, as well.

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According to Dropout Nation:

Besides the donations, AFT has key supporters within Clinton’s political machine. Hartina Flournoy, a Democratic National Committee member who serves as former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, previously served as top assistant to AFT President Rhonda (Randi) Weingarten. Thanks to her longtime friendship with Hillary, Flournoy now serves as Weingarten’s key go-between. Donna Brazile, the longtime Clinton apparatchik who is now the interim boss of the Democratic National Committee (as well as co-chair of AFT front group Democrats for Public Education), is a longtime beneficiary of AFT’s largesse; her eponymous outfit collected $110,000 from the union in 2015-2015, and has collected $210,000 from AFT over the past two years.

The union even made sure to win over Ann O’Leary, a supposed reformer who is advising Clinton’s campaign on education policy, by giving $125,000 to the Opportunity Institute, an outfit she cofounded (and on whose board she sits) that focuses on early childhood education and other social policy issues. As reformers may remember, O’Leary attempted to quell the fears of the movement last year after Clinton stated to talk show host Roland Martin and at an AFT event that she opposed the expansion of public charter schools. This was music to the ears of AFT, which has long opposed school choice (and whose Big Apple local, United Federation of Teachers, failed miserably in operating charters on its own). Opportunity Institute’s directors include billionaire Tom Steyer, a key player within Democracy Alliance, the secretive progressive political action outfit to which AFT (along with the National Education Association) is a member.

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The education blog identified more than $1.3 million in AFT spending on politically oriented organizations, including Clinton’s two foundation, $200,00o to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, $180,000 to the Democratic National Convention CEO Leah Daughtry, $125,000 to the Democratic Governors Association, $110,000 to DNC boss Dona Brazile’s Brazile & Associates, $80,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, $75,000 to the Democracy Alliance, among other “donations.”

The spending has resulted in a Democratic Party platform that encourages increased spending on failing unionized public schools and a moratorium on charter schools that have successfully closed the achievement gap between black and white students.

Hillary Clinton has promoted the party’s education platform by touting many of the same frayed and disproven talking points about charter schools that teachers unions have complained about for years.

That platform, which aims to restrict school choice, “affirms an education system that denies its shortcomings and is unwilling to address them,” said Peter Cummings, an assistant secretary in President Obama’s Education Department.

The Clinton education plan, Cunningham said, is “a step backwards” that will hurt “low-income black and Hispanic children” the most, the Wall Street Journal reports.